Jailbreak

Cydia

On Friday, Jay Freeman (aka Saurik) posted a crimson enclosed notice on the front page of Cydia acknowledging an unfortunate problem plaguing no shortage of prominent digital domains. Reddit, Quora, FourSquare, Hootsuite, the New York Times, ProPublica and, yes, Cydia - not to mention about five dozen other sites - are enduring a significant outage that is, for obvious reasons, raising some serious questions about the reliability of Amazon Web Services and all things cloud-related.

On Thursday, Freeman posted an update on Twitter regarding the widespread dilemma. "Amazon EC2 (which does host the primary Cydia website, purchasing, etc.) is currently experiencing severe issues: nothing I can do but wait," he tweeted. Tonight, Cydia has been updated with the following message:

Amazon EC2, which hosts Cydia's internal website, has been having extreme issues for - 40 hours. This outage affects the ability to purchase paid products, the Theme Center, and Manage Account. I (saurik) have been sleeping in hour-and-a-half shifts since this outage began in order to keep a dialog open with Amazon "Premium Support" regarding this issue. Recently, enough access was recovered in order for me to modify the home page to add this message.

Unfortunately, Amazon's status and ETAs have been confusingly vague and highly optimistic throughout the experience, causing me to be unable to make good decisions about disaster recovery choices. At this time, the latest news from Amazon AWS (as of two hours ago) was "that this will take 3-4 hours until full access is restored." Meanwhile, Premium Support has asked engineering to prioritize recovering Cydia's infrastructure. (For those interested in this sort of thing: this is the same Amazon EC2 outage that has been affecting other sites like reddit and foursquare.)

According to CNN Money in their ongoing coverage of this digital disaster, Amazon "touts the way it links together many different data centers to protect customers from isolated failures." In fact, it promises to keep customers' sites up and running 99.95% of the year, "or it will shave 10% off customers' monthly bills."

We'll keep you posted on the Cydia outage and the ongoing repair and recovery efforts.